Roy Harris: An unconventional convention

On the eve of this year’s gathering of Democrats in Denver, a former cub reporter looks back 40 years later at the turbulent Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

Roy Harris

Rookie reporters just out of college rarely get to cover national political conventions. So 40 years ago, it was a happy surprise when my employer of three months – the Los Angeles Times – asked me to fly east to Chicago to join its high-level team of journalists following the 1968 Democratic National Convention.

It was the first of many surprises that August, as I found myself immersed in the most outrageous political convention in American history.

Looking back, I can see some strategic sense in picking a 22-year-old reporter just out of a Chicago-area journalism school, even if my political coverage at the Daily Northwestern was limited to student Senate meetings. I was to be responsible for following the “street scene” outside the convention center – work the senior reporters didn’t want, believing that the real show was inside, where Vice President Hubert Humphrey seemed sure to be nominated.

How much harm could I do keeping track of the ragtag thousands planning to sleep in the parks and protest the Vietnam War? While counterculture “leaders” proclaimed the creation of the Youth International Party (Yippies for short), Chicago really had become a magnet for ordinary kids disaffected by a war that threatened their sense of American pride – and their personal futures.

Their movement had brought down President Lyndon Johnson, leaving after one elected term. But anti-war Democrat Eugene McCarthy hadn’t gained enough traction, and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated moments after winning the California primary.

Surveying the pre-convention scene, I saw that the Yippies enraged the Chicago police, as instruments of almost comically powerful Mayor Richard J. Daley. Many cops had kids in Vietnam. But also, with their city on global display, they viewed the mobs of unruly youngsters as blots on Chicago’s “orderly” image. Making no provision for the young visitors worsened things, of course, for the park-dwellers and city-dwellers alike.

Today, my minuscule part in the political drama is captured in five yellowed Times front sections from Aug. 26 to Aug. 31, marking the 40th anniversary of what an official commission was to declare “police riots.”

How interesting that this week's Democratic National Convention, in Denver, will crown a senator from Chicago, Barack Obama, who was a 7-year-old (and living in Indonesia) when my old story broke.

Dropping dimes

My first days in town involved meeting the park people, getting a feel for the community, its leaders, and the demonstration plans. I got acquainted, too, with the in-your-face style of Yippies Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Tom Hayden as they planned “street theater” designed to provoke the police and federal troops on crowd-control duty. (A year later, as members of the “Chicago Seven,” the three were given stiff sentences by a tough local judge – later overturned by an appeals court.)

It was before cell phones. So I carried lots of dimes and regularly called Times Chicago bureau chief Don Bruckner, who turned my contributions into cogent prose.

Monday, Aug. 26, things got ugly, with the soon-to-be-familiar stench of tear gas filling Lincoln Park. (The police, of course, wore gas masks.) Announcing their intentions through bullhorns and swinging their clubs, they ousted 1,500 young people – who, of course, had nowhere else to go. I started running out of dimes.

Tuesday’s L.A. Times front page led with a move to draft Sen. Edward Kennedy as the candidate, instead of Humphrey – though Kennedy quickly squelched it. But there at the bottom was the fruit of my labor: “Demonstrators Gassed, Clubbed in Chicago.”

As the confrontations continued the next day, several more Times staffers left the convention center to join the intrepid band of reporters on the streets.

“HUMPHREY NOMINATED ON 1ST BALLOT,” the Times’ banner proclaimed on Thursday. Below it: “Chicago Police Charge, Club Crowd at Hotel.” The article duly reported that there were 100 people injured and 150 arrested, with one fellow Times reporter being in both categories, taken into custody in a hotel lobby, and struck by two officers. Finally, at the end of the story, my name made the paper. It wasn’t in a byline.

“Another Times reporter, Roy Harris Jr., was clubbed on the back by a uniformed policeman who was chasing a group of demonstrators through the Loop. Harris said he was not seriously injured, but that a Roman Catholic priest who was running next to him was clubbed to the street and severely beaten by several policemen.”

I can picture it yet: the snarling officers so clearly angry at that priest for taking the anti-war, and anti-CHICAGO side. Said another headline: “Streets Filled With Screams – and Blood.”

Lasting impact

With the wild convention finally over, I stayed in Illinois, leaving the Times and starting graduate school. The next year I entered the Army and was sent to Germany. But what I witnessed in Chicago had a lasting impact. From Europe I saw in the 1969 Woodstock experience a reflection of the spirit that many youthful Chicago demonstrators wanted to create. In 1970, the Kent State shootings provoked much more painful memories.

As a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, starting in 1971, I found other stories that took me back to Chicago in my mind – including grim reminders in Los Angeles, as I helped cover the 1991 race rioting after the police beating of black motorist Rodney King, and, later, the 1994 Northridge earthquake.

During my most recent project – producing a book on the Pulitzer Prizes – I marveled at America’s greatest team-based reporting, often under extreme situations.

But for this convention, let’s hope that the big story remains the candidates within, rather than confrontations without.

Roy Harris lives in Hingham, Mass., and is the author of “Pulitzer’s Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism” (University of Missouri Press.) He is a senior editor at The Economist Group’s Boston-based CFO magazine. This column appeared in The Patriot Ledger.